The Ad Network Business: Not Doing So Bad, After All?

Remember that
news about a slump in online ad networks? Bogus, says Frank
Addante, CEO of The
Rubicon Project. He says ad rates are up 20% in the last two
months among the biggest players.

Who is Addante, and why should we listen to him? His company
operates the equivalent of a trading desk for publishers and ad
networks. Publishers allocate their ad inventory to Rubicon,
which manages the relationships with the ad networks, shifting
dollars between networks to get the best ad rate. So Rubicon can
see all the rates being paid for impressions on the top 154
networks, including biggies like Advertising.com, AdBrite,
BlueLithium, Google AdSense, etc.

Addante says new vertical networks organized around a specific
target audiences are getting a higher CPM, and bigger brand
advertisers are starting to use networks more. Also, he says
international sales are growing fast.

Last month
PubMatic told us that overall CPMs for Web publishers had
fallen 23% between March and April. Like Rubicon, PubMatic also
manages/optimizes ad networks for publishers. So which one is
right? It's possible that both are, because they're looking at
different data sets. Pubmatic was looking at
rates across 3,000 publishers. Rubicon is also looking at
thousands of publishers, but only the inventory placed on the top
150 or so ad networks. Anyone else want to hazard a guess? We're
all ears.